Totalism

Tonight's blog is unlikely to be a long one.  Why is that?  Well, here's what happened.  I started to listen to the listening examples given for totalism, then started to do my standard research on the composers, related pieces, etc.  This led to more articles, and more and more pieces worth checking out and listening to, more scores worth skimming through.  Now it's four hours later, it's very late, and I have only just started writing this blog.

This is some of the music that, subjectively, I seem to love the most.  John Luther Adams, Michael Gordon, David Lang, etc.--these are composers whose music I could listen to for days, and always be finding something new, always enjoying each next piece.  Totalism is (according to Wikipedia) about the balance of background complexity with surface rhythmic complexity.  I love this.  I could even reframe it as such: totalism is a method through which composers create intelligent music that also grooves and maintains a sense of fun.  This does not apply in every case (e.g. JLA's music is rarely "fun" to my ears), but it is a decent summary of why I so often and deeply enjoy it.  I can truly enjoy it on the very first listening, unlike many composers I quite like, because I can groove along with it, and thereby really involve myself in the affect.  Then, I can enjoy it more with each subsequent listening, as I pick out more and more of the legitimate intricacy and intelligence of composition going on underneath the rhythmically complex surface.

I do have one major question here: how do we distinguish between totalism and post-minimalism?  Having read some different things about both topics tonight, I've come to several assumptions, but I don't know if they are correct.  I've listened to lots of both styles before, but no one has ever been there to tell me "This one is post-minimalist; this one is totalist."  As a result, I have no frame with which to distinguish between the two.  It seems to me, from my minimal reading tonight, that totalism focuses more on rhythmic complexity, whereas post-minimalism, while placing emphasis on importance of rhythm, is not always dependent on complexity of rhythm.  It also seems that post-minimalism is usually "pretty" and centric in some fashion, whereas totalism does not feel the need to do the same, and is often dissonant (though it often maintains a sense of fun and audience-friendliness through groove).  Are my assumptions here correct?  I might be totally off-base.  Kyle Gann has a discography list of post-minimal, totalist, and rare minimalist music, which can be found here.  How do he and others make these distinctions?  He does say that the line between the two is fairly arbitrary, but I'm not even sure what the arbitrary line is based on--how do they differ?

John Luther Adams (JLA) is often an exception to several things I've stated here.  His music only occasionally has a "groove," and when it does, it is often more of an insistent pulsing, or otherwise an incomprehensibly dense rhythmic texture, instead of a groovy beat.  JLA's music is almost exclusively based on or taking inspiration from the nature of Alaska, where he lives.  His sound is wide open and often has a sense of isolation.  He talks about Alaska as a "great reservoir of silence," and this enters his music, keeping it wide open in timbre and lending value to many of his textural ideas.

One thing that absolutely anchors JLA in totalism is his rhythmic complexity.  It is not always immediately apparent, but it is almost always present.  For example, in his work "In the White Silence," the entire piece sounds to exist simply as slowly evolving textures.  However, while most of the notes last over a measure long and are legato in nature, when a note changes, it is usually in a strange rhythmic position--the second half-note triplet of the bar, or the third quintuplet of the half-measure, etc.  This reaches the ears as gradual a metric changes, but using complex changing points allows for the voices of this "chorale" to avoid changing at the same time, activating the texture of the work without it sounding like a bland, homorhythmic romantic chorale.

It's worth taking a minute to discuss JLA's massive recent work Inuksuit for 9 to 99 percussionists.  It is a spatial, outdoor work, usually spread out across a park or several acres of field or forest.  The audience is invited to wander among the performers at will, allowing each to construct his or her own experience (just like Cage's HPSCHD).  I mention the work not only because it is a recent passion of mine (and I finally get to perform it for the first time this May), but because the work has become something totally unique to the musical world--it has created a new series of mini-festivals based around itself.  I don't think JLA realized it when he composed the work, but he was creating the perfect storm for weekend percussion getaways.  It is now the norm for any city or university to host an Inuksuit--"Inuksuit Rochester," "Inuksuit Wisconsin," "Inuksuit Brooklyn," etc.  A loving and devoted community has developed around the piece, and when someone decides to put the piece together the Inuksuit crowd always comes out of the woodwork from a radius of hundreds of miles around.  They gather for the weekend to hang with other interesting and fun musicians and put together a huge percussive work, then head back to their respective homes and wait for the next Inuksuit festival.  At this point, there is an Inuksuit somewhere in the country at least once every two or three months.  JLA attends many of them, and most are run by Doug Perkins (current percussionist of eighth blackbird, champion of cool new music, and in many ways a mentor/father figure to the young chamber percussion community--I've mentioned him several times in this blog, and he continues to be relevant).  I wonder if there are currently or have ever been pieces of music that have elicited a similar response, in galvanizing many mini-festivals and creating a widespread community who travel long ways to make the piece happen once in a while in different locations.  Any ideas for pieces that have created similar movements?

A fun little video about the making of the Inuksuit recording,

which is a wholly remarkable recording--it never should have

worked nearly as well as it did, and it makes for an incredible album.

With Inuksuit, again JLA has created a work about atmosphere, not groove, but using incredibly intricate rhythmic relationships in order to create the shifting atmosphere.  He stacks rhythms using unique notation methods, and it ranges from static droning to a wall of frenetic percussive chaos.  Alex Ross of the New Yorker called it "one of the most rapturous experiences of my listening life."  It's a heck of an experience.

JLA is also important right now as the most recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music, which he won just last weekend for his orchestral work Become Ocean.  I have yet to hear the work, but I cannot wait to (it's not yet available anywhere).  It's classic JLA, for a multitude of reasons--symmetrical form, long cascading waves of intensification and subsiding, lush string sounds, strongly and actively environmentalist, and deeply entrenched in Alaska and Alaskan issues.  All of these are hallmarks of nearly all JLA's works.  His totalist style allows his music to float, free of rhythmic chains, through its own unique rhythmic complexity.  This, added to the intelligence running through the pitch material, scoring, etc. is where the term totalism becomes appropriately descriptive of his work.